Hot Topics:

Florence Police Department questions person of interest in connection with threatening post made ahead of school walkouts

Threat alters plans for Cañon City High School students' walkout

By Sara Knuth

The Daily Record

Posted:
03/14/2018 10:47:56 AM MDT

Cañon City High School students walk into the school in January. (Sara Knuth / Daily Record)

What was supposed to be a walkout to protest deadly violence in schools turned into a building lockout Wednesday in the Florence-Penrose and Cañon City school districts.

Florence Police Chief Mike DeLaurentis said detectives and investigators with the district attorney's office are questioning a person of interest in connection with a threatening social media post, created ahead of protests planned for Wednesday.

The post, which depicted part of a weapon, was reported to Florence police, DeLaurentis said, and an investigation began in the early hours of the day.

As a precaution, both school districts were placed on lockout status in the morning, meaning no one was allowed to enter or exit the buildings. Inside the schools, officials said, class operated as normal.

Florence schools lifted the lockout status at about 12:30 p.m. As authorities investigated the post, DeLaurentis said, they found that the post's creator at a house. At Florence High School, officers with the Colorado State Patrol and Fremont County Sheriff's Office helped monitor the area, making sure no one entered or exited the building, he said.

There are no other threats at this time, he said, and school is expected to continue as scheduled Thursday with regular police presence.

In Cañon City, the lockout status was lifted, except for Harrison School and Mountain View Core Knowledge School because of police activity in the area.

Advertisement

Cañon City School District Superintendent George Welsh said the district was alerted by the Florence-Penrose School District of the potential threat in the district, which prompted the neighboring schools to move into the status.

High school students originally planned Wednesday to take part in the walkout, organized nationally by students to start a discussion about ending school violence in light of the Feb. 14 shooting in Parkland, Fla. There, a gunman shot and killed 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

As part of the walkout, CCHS planned, at the request of students, to conduct an evacuation drill at 10 a.m. in a "safe and controlled manner," Principal Bill Summers wrote in a letter to parents.

The high-schoolers planned to observe 17 minutes of silence, representing one minute for each victim of the Parkland shooting. No students would have been forced to participate, the letter said.

But since the Cañon City School District was in lockout status, Welsh said, students were allowed to participate in a demonstration within the walls of CCHS.

"If kids did want to do some kind of demonstration, they were welcome to do it under lockout situation and move to the gymnasium and gather there and do whatever they were going to do for 17 minutes," he said.

Summers could not estimate how many students participated in the demonstration, but said "it was a good number."

"Our students were extremely respectful, it shows that Cañon City High School's community and students are every bit what we expect and anticipate they will be," he said.

Article Comments

We reserve the right to remove any comment that violates our ground rules, is spammy, NSFW, defamatory, rude, reckless to the community, etc.

We expect everyone to be respectful of other commenters. It's fine to have differences of opinion, but there's no need to act like a jerk.

Use your own words (don't copy and paste from elsewhere), be honest and don't pretend to be someone (or something) you're not.

Our commenting section is self-policing, so if you see a comment that violates our ground rules, flag it (mouse over to the far right of the commenter's name until you see the flag symbol and click that), then we'll review it.